(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) With its wokest array of nominees yet, this year’s Oscars all but assured that any gradual ratings gains they had clawed back since the disasterous 2021 COVID season would go down the drain like the Hershey’s chocolate syrup used in Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic Psycho shower scene.
Once again, however, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has shot itself in the foot while playing the dangerous game of identity politics.
On Thursday, Karla Sofía Gascón—the transgender star of the top-nominated Emilia Pérez, who made movie history as the first biological male to compete in the “best actress” category—was found to have made old posts on social media that violated the Left’s dogma in the most unforgivable ways possible.
it’s so insane that karla sofía gascón still has these tweets up. straight up have never seen tweets this racist from someone actively campaigning to win an ACADEMY AWARD. there are more than a dozen… pic.twitter.com/1rcNzkJXuo
— sarah hagi (@KindaHagi) January 30, 2025
Gascón (whose “dead name” is Juan Carlos) transitioned in 2018.
The 52-year-old native of Alcobendas, Spain, might have had a date with destiny when the Oscars opted to change their standard regarding men portraying women—after potentially robbing “best actress” contenders like Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie and Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire of their much-deserved statuettes.
Unfortunately for Gascón, a recent public-relations fiasco may deny the trans community its due, as the New York Post‘s Page Six reported.
The problem isn’t that Hollywood fears the backlash from foisting the LGBT agenda onto an audience that has little appetite for it. Rather, it is that Gascón stepped outside of the intersectionality pecking order with a series of controversial tweets spanning a period of roughly seven years.
Ironically, some might argue that all the trans actor did was speak the truth.
“I’m sorry, Is it just my impression or is there more muslims in Spain?” Gascón wrote in one 2020 Twitter post translated from its original Spanish into English.
“Every time I go to pick up my daughter from school there are more women with their hair covered and their skirts down to their heels,” Gascón continued. “Next year instead of English we’ll have to teach Arabic.”
Several of the newly resurfaced tweets took aim at the Muslim community—whom Gascón referred to as an “infection for humanity that urgently needs to be cured”—and also the black community, sometimes within the same tweet.
“Let me get this straight: if you say that the f**king moors are back killing them, that’s racism, but if a Libyan terrorist starts stabbing white people in a park in England, that’s justice for oppression,” Gascón wrote. “The greatest backwardness in rights is in Islam.”
this is all from the star of a movie that is campaigning on its progressive values, you really gotta laugh. stuff like this doesn’t get flagged because you can say whatever you want about muslims, it’s never considered racist. again, this isn’t even all of them pic.twitter.com/Cq8rQaiSmm
— sarah hagi (@KindaHagi) January 30, 2025
The Oscar nominee’s controversial posts, unearthed by Canadian journalist Sarah Hagi, were dated from 2016 to 2023, even as others were seeing their careers destroyed for the mildest hint of skepticism directed at the now-discredited Black Lives Matter movement.
Gascón, however, fearlessly weighed in on the death of George Floyd, adding a unique take on the real reasons why the BLM martyr had resonated so intensely with left-wing activists seeking to sow civil disorder.
“I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys Without rights and consider policemen to be assassins,” Gascón wrote. “They’re all wrong.”
The scandal launched a desperate damage-control operation from Netflix, the company behind Emilia Pérez, which was poised to lose out bigtime by the backlash if Academy voters took it out on the entire project. Including the best actress nod for Gascón, the film’s 13 nominations came up just short of the record of 14 held by Titanic, La La Land and All About Eve.
“I want to acknowledge the conversation around my past social media posts that have caused hurt,” Gascón said in a follow-up apology.
“As someone in a marginalized community, I know this suffering all too well and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain,” added the actor, who was not technically marginalized when the first tweets were posted. “All my life I have fought for a better world. I believe light will always triumph over darkness.”
While the PR Dumpster fire is unlikely to lure conservatives into sitting through the insufferable Oscar ceremony, it could make things more interesting, particularly if outraged Muslims launch their own red-carpet protests mirroring the pro-Hamas disorder that consumed many college campuses last year.
The double victory of having a biological male and raging xenophobe beat out four woke actresses in the ultimate showcase of Hollywood’s out-of-touch irrelevance might make an interesting contest yet out of what otherwise promised to be a clunker of a ceremony.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
